I have been awarded a BBVA Foundation scholarship for early-career researchers

Fecha de publicación: 09-nov-2014 10:54:47

EMOCCC es un proyecto para completar el primer estudio diacrónico de la expresión poética de las emociones en la poesía griega, desde Homero hasta nuestros días, desarrollando para ello la investigación en ciencia cognitiva acerca de la integración de conceptos. EMOCCC también sentará las bases para un estudio a gran escala de la expresión verbal de las emociones en las principales lenguas europeas, comparando el discurso poético con el lenguaje cotidiano. El objetivo último es cambiar algunos de los paradigmas actuales sobre la relación emoción-cognición-cultura y las proyecciones conceptuales (conceptual mappings). EMOCCC se apoyará en la experiencia investigadora del solicitante sobre el tema para completar bases de datos de expresiones de la emoción de literatura griega y comparada, así como una monografía basada en ellas.

EMOCCC tendrá la oportunidad de desarrollarse en el mejor entorno posible: el proyecto Historia de la Cognición Distribuida (HDistCog) del Profesor Douglas Cairns, que acaba de arrancar en la Universidad de Edimburgo. Al igual que el solicitante, el Profesor Cairns ha realizado trabajos pioneros aplicando conceptos de la lingüística cognitiva al estudio de las emociones en la Antigua Grecia, y actualmente está escribiendo una monografía titulada Mind, Body and Metaphor in Ancient Greek Concepts of Emotion. Además, el profesor Cairns es el IP de HDistCog, un proyecto dotado con £600.000 por el Arts and Humanities Research Council del Reino Unido. La finalidad del proyecto es conectar las Humanidades y las Ciencias Cognitivas mediante un gran estudio diacrónico de las ideas que han conducido al paradigma que en ciencia cognitiva puede llamarse Cognición Distribuida, es decir, la visión de la cognición como algo que no reside sólo en el cerebro o en el cuerpo (embodied cognition), sino también en el mundo material y en el ámbito cultural.

English summary (longer)

Emotions are a ubiquitous aspect of experience, but they cannot be conceived and expressed in themselves. Due to its complexity, the expression of emotions is necessarily structured through more clearly delineated concepts, such as bodily sensations (“burn with desire”) or simple perceptions, such as those related to containers or the motion of objects (“full of anger”). This makes emotion a classical example of a metaphorical concept. Metaphorical concepts differ between cultures, periods, and discursive genres. At the same time, these concepts are based on universal connections between mental structures. The discovery of these connections, also known as conceptual projections or mappings, has been one of the major advances in cognitive science and linguistics. Through mappings, the mind projects information from one conceptual domain to another.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), originated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson has devoted great attention to metaphorical concepts of emotion (Lakoff’s and Zoltan Kövecses’ work, in particular), such as love is a journey, anger is heat, emotion is force, etc. Conceptual metaphors, which give rise to many particular metaphorical expressions, are fixed sets of partial correspondences between two conceptual domains. However, these studies are mainly based on decontextualized, idiomatic linguistic expressions. My project also seeks to study the emergence of novel meanings, pragmatic and aesthetic effects,creativity, culture, context, and diachrony.

For this, EMOCCC explores an alternative proposal, derived from Conceptual Integration Theory, or Blending Theory (BT), by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. According to BT, the mind is constantly integrating small conceptual packets, which flexibly combine entrenched structures and contextual information, for local purposes of thought and action. Two or more spacesproject selected elements to a blended space or conceptual blend, forming a network. Elements from the inputs interact in the blend and produce a new whole with emergent properties, unavailable from any input, and built for the specific purposes of the network in context. The network model exposes phenomena that are invisible for an "A-to-B" transfer model: compression of many concepts into one, principles for building an optimal blend, different versions of the blend to suit context and goals, etc.

EMOCCC will study generic templates for conceptual integration across the poetic expression of emotions: a blend of emission and love (the arrows of love, the beloved as emitter of light), a blend of a container and a person who feels an emotion, etc. Rather than fixed patterns for projections between domains, these templates are flexible instructions for creating conceptual blends, which form new conceptual wholes with specific purposes. This proposal is very congenial with the idea of distributed cognition: meaning construction involves not only neural activity or the anchoring of concepts on bodily feelings and perceptions, but also, and decisively, the interaction with the physical, cultural, and social environment, as well as individual creativity and the cognitive habits acquired during the first months of life, when certain modes of spatial cognition are privileged.

The twenty-eight centuries of uninterrupted Greek literary tradition offer the biggest field for the diachronic analysis of conceptual integration templates. EMOCCC will study these patterns and their creative use for the expression of emotion within a variety of cultural environments, throughout a wide selection of poetic texts in ancient and modern Greek. This study will provide the basis for a comparative database for the expression of emotions in the main European literatures.